What Is The Theme Of Dulce Et Decorum Est By Wilfred Owen Poem

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Recommended: Two contrasting poems about war

The Everlasting Nightmare
Imagine an everlasting nightmare! Something you can never outrun or hide from, no matter how hard you try you just cannot get it out of your head. It affects your everyday life: your relationships, your actions. It is a horrendous and unescapable pain drilled into the depths of your brain and deepest crevices of your heart. This is what Wilfred Owen is depicting in his sonnet “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” He re-counts a vivid remembrance where he observed a man drown in a sea of green gas, then returns home to a populace that pursues glory, and believes it is sweet and honorable to die in battle. By using, a barge of themes, diction, and sarcasm Owen illustrates the pain and interminable effects of war.
Owen chooses his …show more content…

He is trudging with the men at the beginning of the sonnet and dreaming of them at the end. The poem revolves around the speaker as a witness, a witness to devastation and destruction. The speaker watches as a fellow comrade drowns in the green sea of gas fumes. This image is deeply rooted into the speaker’s mind throughout the poem’s entirety, as if there is no possible way he could forget the horrors he seen. The image of war scarred this soldier’s mind as it does to most, and the “smothering dreams” of battle will be constantly replayed in their heads. The magnitude of the trauma caused by the horrid memory would be enough to make any individual feel resentment towards the “high zestful liars”. The speaker’s spirits towards the “high zestful liars” is on display in the last four lines of the poem. The speaker uses sarcasm to illuminate the misconceptions the prideful people have about war. His final lines are, “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori” ( 25-28). To put his words more simply, if the prideful people knew the truths about war and seen the gruesome life-altering events they would not be preaching “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori,” which means it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country. Had the people witnessed firsthand a fellow comrade plunging at them seeking help, …show more content…

The poem turns into the mind of the speaker where the everlasting nightmare inhabits. The second stanza gives the reader a good sense about how horrid actual battle scenes are; however, the difference between the actual battlefield and the speakers mind remains to be unseen. By doing this, Owen is saying there is not a difference between the appalling scenes of wartime and the traumatized mind of the soldier there after. This is because the soldier’s mind is incapable of leaving the battlefield; the images will forever be a part of the brain. In the second stanza when the speaker cries out, “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning,” it is problematic to discern if the speaker is in battle or looking back on the

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